For Louvre Abu Dhabi

Holzer has worked with language since the 1970s, first pasting anonymous one-line truisms onto the streets of New York, later projecting texts onto buildings and carving them into benches and floors. Here, instead of her own words, she borrowed voices from three civilisations and three scripts, in keeping with the museum's theme of cultures in conversation. Look at the way the engraved cuneiform catches the spots of light from the dome, so that the oldest writing in the world seems to flicker, and at how the lines of Arabic and French, one running right to left and one left to right, face each other across the plaza.

The tablet Holzer copied is a real object in a museum collection, and the bilingual myth it records was already a translation exercise four thousand years ago. Her walls are permanent and were made for the opening of the museum in November 2017, alongside Giuseppe Penone's bronze tree. Walk close and run your eye down the columns: even without reading, you can follow the shift from picture-like signs to flowing script, which is the story of writing itself.

Did You Know? The cuneiform wall reproduces a tablet that already translated a Sumerian creation myth into Akkadian, so it is a translation of a translation, carved four thousand years later.